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Man! Am I glad we invented roofs (and umbrellas)! With weather like this it would be very wet (and cold) to work outside and it would probably also create various problems for the computers. So we stay inside. A new videolog is getting the last polish so we hope to be able to get that out to you guys very soon. Reto.Gargamel is also back at work; sniffing around with a notepad and his trusty screenshot camera to find stories and images to show you of what is happening inside Reto HQ. NB – with “sniffing around”, I mean talking to fellow devs over lunch, with “notepad” I mean Notepad++ and by “screenshot camera”, well, he basically starts a dev version of the game and takes screenshots, but it sounded better :-)

While keeping an eye on performance of the live servers and how the Manstein build generally behaves, we are getting hotfixes rolled out when necessary and doing our very best to fix whatever issues come up so we don’t have to end battles or wars, but can let them play out, so YOU the players have the possibility of every single second of heroics!

We have also recently gone through the forum and cleaned it up a bit. It was a bit too confusing to find the right place to post, so we gave it a coat of ‘streamline’ AND added non-English sub-fora for Czech, German, Polish & Russian. This is just a test to begin with and if we have groups of people that wants more languages added we can do that, and if some parts end up not being used we will remove them.

Fall is truly here. Stormclouds everywhere, rain falling from the clouds and cold winds blowing, so there’s nothing better to do than grab a hot cup of coffee and get to work! As you have probably noticed we have released the Manstein build and we are monitoring server performance as well as client issues and hotfixing whenever we see issues.

We are also doing all we can to gather feedback on new features and then match the community’s ideas with our plans and designs. So head over to the forums and discuss and chat with your fellow players.

We are currently in the process of locking down the features for the next build, and I am gathering screenshots and info from the rest of the devs so we can start presenting the new features in the coming build.

On another note reto.Gargamel is busy playing the Manstein build to find new exciting ideas for the “Half the battle” column. Please drop him a PM in the forum or write a comment if you have ideas for future posts.

Textures streaming in. Bugs getting reported and fixed. There is not much to report in this Intelligence Bulletin as most of our efforts are focused on fixing bugs. Improving the build stability. Measuring performance and a lot more all related to the new Manstein build. We have been playing around with the new MG34 and as you might have noticed we are in the process of locking down the next steps in the light tank structure and the lively discussion is providing a lot of valuable feedback, and (I think) some people are discovering that creating a list that is both fun and balanced is not an easy task and opens a lot of interesting bits to think and talk about. We are also aware that some players are experiencing higher pings than usual; this is due to a broken switch at our Amsterdam hosting center that made two of the larger servers unusable. The provider are still working on getting their hardware fixed, but we’ve had to take the two machines behind that switch offline until our hosting center gets their stuff fixed. Hopefully they can get spare parts for their switch soon as it is getting REALLY annoying.

The resource system is also being put through its paces before we roll out the texture streaming in the Manstein build. We built a couple of machines identical to the ones we got reports on and used that for tweaking performance variables. This, combined with the texture streaming should provide a performance boost on both low-end and mid-range graphics cards.

Stay tuned for more sneak-peeks of incoming features and behind the scenes stories, and now I will spend the rest of the day driving various vehicles through poor farmers’ fences.

Indian Summer? The calendar says late September, but the sky is blue, the sun is shining and we released a new videolog. Please note the impressive flying in the beginning; we saw the video fightingfalconf16 posted online and went in; ID’ed the session and grabbed the replay from the server. If you see awesome things like this in the game, please make a note of when it happened (and your timezone), the name of the battle, and the names of the players involved. Then you might be featured in our next video or we might make a compilation video of awesome heroics :-)

The other main things happening here at HQ, is the continued tracking of how the servers run and putting out hotfixes as well as locking down the feature set for the next build. We will then spend the next while making sure the new features work and play well together with the existing features and of course eliminate all bugs we find on the way.

We are lurking! After the release of the build you might have noticed a lot less happening on the blog, that is because we like the new build as much as you do and spend all our waking hours playing the game, both on our Reto. accounts and lurking on other accounts getting as indepth a feel of how you like the build as possible. And yeah, we are just as happy with it as you are, but alas, we cannot just sit around and play games. We have to build it. So we are now shifting our primary focus back on development and we are hammering away at new features, stability etc.

Reto.vashu recently gathered 20!!! pages of questions from the forum and we are currently sorting them into groups based on whether they relate to the action game, strategy, bugs, general feedback etc. and I (Reto.Robotron3000 and Reto.Gargamel) just started pestering devs for answers that we can then translate from the long sequences of 0s & 1s and colourful squiggles the coders and graphics guys normally use for communication.

After a bit of downtime, the servers are back up with the Leeb build. A couple of the servers also moved physical location, some of the got updated hardware and they all had a bit of TLC. Rolling out a new build is always exciting as it is such a great feeling to let you guys play with and experience the new features we have built.

On another note we have reinforced the community team with Alex aka Reto.Chinch – Reto.Chinch is based in London and will work as a spy in the War Office, community manager, helping us take better care of all players, their feedback, questions etc. as well as help me (Reto.Robotron3000) with getting more exciting information out in various formats. We will of course do a full developer profile (detailing and disclosing every single skeleton in every single closet) shortly, but until that surfaces, please join me in welcoming Reto.Chinch to the team. I also hope that you have all enjoyed the last couple of weeks’ posts on the new features in Leeb, and that they have given you some ideas of what you can expect to experience in the game. As always if you have ideas for stuff you would like to know more about in the game, please let us know and we will do our best to answer your questions!

New build incoming! We are currently hard at work hammering away at the new armor model getting it into tip-top shape. The ‘Leeb’ build will show the first iteration and it will form a solid base from which we can start expanding the damage models on vehicles to make them more fun to both fight in and against. Hiding behind trees and observing these metal beasts moving about are the new recon models. We have already released a sneak peek of the German and a sneak peek of the new American recon is on its way as well.

Based on ao. a lot of DxDiags detailing performance issues we have started focusing on more specific performance issues and we are working on making the game run better and more stable for everybody, so over the next couple of months a lot of our focus will be on these issues. We do of course have new features planned, but we also want to increase stability, performance, scalability, fix bugs etc. This might not be as exciting as new content, but it will make the game more fun and give us a more stable platform for the continued development of new features.

Also, as we have done a couple of times before Reto.Vashu is gathering questions from you guys in a new Developer Q&A session.

Back to work! After Vacations are coming to an end and we got the Keating build online we have been spending a lot of time examining the data and feedback we have from Keating. As you might have noticed in the earlier Intelligence Bulletins we have spent quite some time profiling how the game performs and adding points where we can get some data to analyze. This has helped us locate and fix some bugs that had been in hiding deep in the code for a long time. It also enables us to better track performance and we are currently gathering as much info as we can on PC configurations that are not performing as we want it. Take a look at this forum thread for a bit more information.

We are currently in the process of locking down the features for the next build, and I am gathering screenshots and info from the rest of the devs so we can start presenting the new features in the coming build.

On another note I have press-ganged reto.Gargamel into starting a new column on the blog called “Half the battle“, with the title taken from the saying “Knowing is half the battle”. In it we’ll try to shine a light on some nifty things you can do in the game. Please drop him a PM in the forum or write a comment if you have ideas for future posts.